What Role Will You Play?

To All of My Beautiful Readers,

I thank you for coming along on all my adventures and diving into the worlds of magic and mystery I’ve created.

The most wonderful thing about fantasy is how we can imagine worlds so different from our own. Maybe there are wizards hiding in London. Maybe there is an evil government trying to slaughter innocent children for reality TV. Maybe there are people fighting for freedom, and maybe they win.

Books, theatre, art―they are all important to the human race, not only for the escape they offer, but also for the mirror they hold up to society. For the questions great works dare to ask.

I would love to give you some funny little anecdote to fill out your week or an empowering stick it to the man moment to fuel your own writing journey, but this isn’t the time to escape.

This is the time to look at the world around us and realize we are standing at the center of the next generation’s plot lines.

The next wave of dystopian novels will ask what happens when normal people have to choose between silence and speaking while a pandemic waits at their door. They will all have armies descending on their own people. There will be a type of person—psychic, star marked, black—that is being abused by the system, and they will all find a heroine to stand at the head of the crowd and prove that the underdog can win.

We’ll all read and wait and hope that good triumphs over evil and the heroine is swept away into her hero’s arms and they’ll relentlessly make out as the narrative fades to black.

But this is the moment that will build the next Katniss. There are girls growing into Hermione’s shoes as I type this.

So today, I have no escape to offer. Instead, I ask you to watch the story unfolding around you.

We have the power to shape the next generation of stories. This is the moment when the rebels stand up to the empire.

What role will you play in the stories the next generation tells?